8vo. Original green pictorial cloth, blocked in black and gilt; pp. xxi, 723, index map and eleven folding colour-printed maps; apart from a few repaired marginal tears to maps a near fine copy.First edition, adapted from Hellwald's Die Erde und ihre Völker for the British market and global interests, edited by Sir Richard Temple, this handbook was published in Stanford's series Compendium of Geography and Travel. The volume deals on pages 30 to 186 with the Middle Eastern contries. Other larger chunks of the volume are on Siberia (c. 150 pages), and the Chinese Empire (over 100 pages). Keane was a Roman Catholic Irish ethnologist and linguist, whose racial typologies were highly debated at the time. However, he upheld the specific unity of human beings.